Some legislative strategies require explaining how they work. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s strategy for passing the SAVE America Act’s voter ID requirements requires explaining that the Senate, which has already voted the bill down three times, will change its mind because the House has stopped passing other things, which is not how the Senate works, and which no senator has indicated is how they plan to be persuaded, and which Luna is pursuing anyway because she has the votes to freeze the House floor and has decided to use them.
According to Fox News, Luna told Fox News Digital: “There’s going to be no votes this week, and it’s going to be as long as it takes.” She has pulled a series of scheduled House votes. Speaker Johnson, who runs the chamber that Luna has now effectively borrowed, floated a compromise: incorporate a narrow version of the SAVE Act into a third budget reconciliation bill, creating grants to encourage states to require REAL IDs at the ballot. Luna described this as “an inadequate fix,” which means the compromise that might actually pass the Senate is too small for the people whose method of obtaining any version of the policy is to ensure that nothing else passes until the Senate reconsiders.
A federal judge this week struck down the executive order version of the same policy, ruling that Trump’s requirement for proof of citizenship at the ballot box exceeded presidential authority. The SAVE Act has now been rejected by the Senate three times, blocked by a federal court once, and remains the organizing principle of a strategy that has frozen an entire legislative chamber. The bill has failed in every venue it has been introduced into, and the response to each failure has been to apply more pressure to a different venue that has not yet failed it, on the theory that eventually one of the venues will run out of ways to say no.
Johnson is scheduled to meet with Trump to resolve a standoff that members of Trump’s own party created by demanding that the branch that said no three times say yes. The farm bill, several appropriations measures, and a roster of other legislative priorities are sitting in the queue behind the voter ID bill, waiting for a Senate that is not going to move.
Luna confirmed to Fox News: “The president’s been very clear. He’s not playing these games anymore, and I’m going to fully back him, and I have the votes to do it.” She said this about a bill the president’s own court blocked and the president’s own Senate majority rejected.
When the strategy for passing a bill is to stop everything else until the people who said no three times say yes, what does the fourth vote look like?
Sources
Fox News: Anna Paulina Luna leads House blockade over voter ID push
Raw Story: Mike Johnson runs to Trump as MAGA Republican seizes ‘control’ of Congress: report
